


Disarmed

by downjune



Series: With Substance [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Communication, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, In Other Words: My Id, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Truth Serum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-11-02 06:37:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20655341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downjune/pseuds/downjune
Summary: “So... we don’t need to have sex to save your life?”“Well, play your cards right,” Nat said and cringed.Tony felt his eyebrows try to escape his forehead. “Okay, what the helldidhe get you with if it wasn’t sex-or-die juice?”





	Disarmed

**Author's Note:**

> A companion/sequel to [Compromised](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19404988).

Disarmed 

Natasha tripped over the balcony railing and landed in a heap outside the sliding glass door of Tony’s eighth-floor hotel room, and it was probably the clumsiest thing he’d ever seen her do. He’d been watching for those grappling hooks, though, so he was ready for her. 

“What an entrance,” he said by way of greeting. “You really stuck the landing there, ten out of ten.”

She didn’t answer him right away, and when she pushed slowly to her hands and knees, Tony’s stomach dropped in alarm. “Shit,” he bit out and knelt down with her. “I told you this was a bad idea. I said, ‘Nat, they’re gonna make you the second you walk into that building. You can’t be a spy once the whole internet knows who you are.’ Didn’t I tell you?”

“Uh huh. You did.” Her voice was strange and muffled behind her mask. She’d never had to cover her face for an op before. He’d designed the snugly fitted mask himself as an addition to her stealth suit, and when she staggered on her way back to her feet, Tony reached for the collar and tugged it up. Some good it had done her.

“Are you hit? Where are you hit?” 

Nat shook her head, and the dark fabric of the catsuit revealed nothing when Tony looked her over. His FRIDAY glasses were inside; shit, he should’ve grabbed them. 

“I’m not,” she answered. 

“You’re sure.”

“We can make sure, if you want.” They’d stumbled back into his room, and she tugged the mask the rest of the way off, revealing the wild cloud of her hair. She had it pulled back into a small knot at the base of her skull, but the short pieces had pulled free to frizz around her face. She paused with a hand at the zip of her suit. “Is Pepper here with you?”

Tony huffed a short laugh. “God, no. She’s on a plane back to New York.” Nat had called in a favor, and Tony had needed Pepper’s help to deliver, so they’d made their SI appearance at the defense tech conference, but she and Tony weren’t on the best of terms these days. The terms themselves were fine. It was fine. They were just different terms. Back-on-a-plane-to-New-York terms. 

“Good.” Her lips pressed into a firm line, and she frowned, like she hadn’t meant for that to slip out.

Tony tugged the blackout curtains shut. “You get your guy?” he asked, and darted his gaze away as she unzipped the suit to her waist and shrugged out of it. 

“Yeah, I did.” She nodded. “He got me first, though.”

“Got you, how? I thought you weren’t hit.” Decorum be damned, he snagged his glasses from the nightstand, slapped them on and scanned her vitals—elevated temp and heartrate. Fuck. She was breathing slow and deep, controlling it. Fighting off something. Tony knew her target’s reputation—knew what he was capable of.

She turned and met his gaze. And he’d learned a long time ago how to look at Natasha Romanoff—once she’d revealed the lie of Natalie Rushman, he’d learned real quick. Everything about her was a weapon, and having gotten over his love affair with weapons after a few months in one of Afghanistan’s finest caves, Tony treated her just as sensibly. 

But then, six months ago she’d climbed into his lap and fucked him to keep his heart from stopping, and that had fucked with him a little. Fucked with how he looked at her. She hadn’t been a weapon then. What she’d done for him hadn’t... He didn’t quite know how to think about what she’d done for him. And he wasn’t sure what he’d do if the same thing were happening right now. 

“Not like that,” she said, and he blinked hard. 

“What?” Shit, had he been staring? Where had he been staring?

“He didn’t get me the way you’re thinking.” She huffed. “Would you take off the glasses please?”

He took them off. “So... we don’t need to have sex to save your life?”

“Well, play your cards right,” she said and cringed. 

Tony felt his eyebrows try to escape his forehead. “Okay, what the hell _did_ he get you with if it wasn’t sex-or-die juice?”

Natasha shrugged, unconvincingly casual in Tony’s estimation. “A cocktail. Barbiturates and a sedative, I’m guessing.”

Tony flapped his hand. “Help me out here, agent. Pharmacological torture isn’t my area of expertise, though I guess I should’ve read up.”

“Truth serum—or something like it.” She sat down on the bed and gripped her arm so she could get a peek at the angry welt on her shoulder—the injection site.

“I thought you were supposed to be resistant.” Tony looked at it, too, his fingers hovering just above the mark. 

“I am. This is me resisting.” She shrugged him off and wriggled the rest of the way out of the suit so that she was dressed only in a tank top and her underwear. Tony couldn’t be sure what definition of “resisting” Natasha operated under, but he’d never seen her this…unwound before.

“When you said you were extracting here instead of the hidey-hole you’d planned on, I thought, I dunno, you wanted to debrief. But you should probably be at SHIELD Medical for this. Unless you’re wanted for this murder you just did, and you need to leave the country for a bit.”

She made a face—more of a face than usual. “Give me some credit. And I don’t need Medical. I need another favor. The only way to get this garbage through my system is to piss it out, so let’s drink, yeah?”

Tony regarded her for a few moments, because that seemed like the kind of old-school bad decision he would have made. He’d been working on not making those, not burning bridges, not fucking up the important relationships in his life. Beyond the one he’d probably done irreparable harm to, on a plane back to New York. He was trying to learn from his mistakes, and this felt like a big one.

“Put some pants on, and yeah. Let’s drink.” There. Nailed it. He turned to the minibar. “Vodka?”

“That’s not going to be enough, but yes. Vodka.”

*

“You know, I can’t help thinking this job was a little below your paygrade. The FBI would’ve nailed the guy eventually.” Tony shook the ice cubes in his glass and watched soda bubbles rise to the surface. Straight vodka was too much for him these days. 

Seated cross-legged on the bed, dressed in his pajama pants, Natasha shook her head. “Not this one. ‘Dr. Basil Workman’ was ‘Vasili Proshkin’ in the Red Room. Nobody in the FBI was going to make that connection.”

“How did you make that connection?”

Natasha took a good-sized swallow of her drink, and when she’d set it back on her knee, Tony added more ice to it. “I’ve kept an eye on his _work_ since leaving the KGB. Seeing that he’d be giving a talk on ‘ethical interrogation techniques’ at the conference this week was too much of an opportunity to pass up.”

“So, this was personal.”

She gave him a look. “SHIELD blew up in my face two years ago, so the number of people I take orders from is down to one, and Nick is still in the wind. Of course, it was personal. Though I also did the world a public service.” She raised her glass in a toast and took another drink.

“You sure vodka’s what you wanna mix with this?” Tony asked before he could stop himself. Maybe Pepper and Rhodey were finally rubbing off on him.

Natasha arched a perfect auburn brow at him. “Are you suggesting I hydrate?”

“Maybe. It’s just, you’ve already got one hell of a cocktail going—you might not want to add another.”

“You don’t get to lecture me on that,” she said and licked her lips. “I’ve cleaned up your puke.”

Her posture was all wrong. Even when Natasha had “relaxed” with the team before, she’d sat more like a study in casual body language, a careful and deliberate mimic. Tony could only recognize this now by the languid way her spine curved when she leaned an elbow on her knee. This was also the first time he’d ever seen her bare feet. He’d expected nail polish, but her toes were bare too.

“That was just the one time five years ago,” he reminded her, “and I was dying. And I thought you were my assistant.”

She made an almost comical face of disgust, the tip of her tongue poking out, the corners of her mouth drawn down. “Oh my god, poor Pepper.”

“I’ve gotten better!” he said defensively. “You know I’ve gotten better.” 

Nat’s smile was small and genuine, then, entirely transforming her face. “You have gotten better. And I find that deeply reassuring, because it means maybe I can too.”

Tony’s battle-scarred heart did a strange and painful thing, and he rubbed absently at it, not taking his eyes off Natasha’s face. She was breathtaking. And she was high as a kite.

“We…should not be talking about serious things like character growth and Red Rooms when you’ve got enough truth serum in you to make every bird in the District of Columbia sing.”

She sobered instantly, the smile dropping from her mouth like it was wiped-away lipstick. “Yes, we should,” she said in that intense way of hers.

“Uh.” Tony exhaled an uneasy laugh. “I know how you are with your secrets. No, we shouldn’t.” 

“I’m tired of my secrets,” she said with a wave of her hand and a roll of her eyes.

“You’re, what now?”

“I don’t want them anymore. I’m tired of them. You’re a nosy bastard, so you probably know more about me than what’s in my SHIELD file.”

“That is…true, yes. But—” 

“Well, here’s the quick and dirty reason I asked you and Pepper to attend this conference as my cover. Vasili Proshkin was the Red Room OBGYN. The drugs to reduce pain and nausea in pregnant women can be used in interrogations, so he practiced on pregnant women. He practiced on all of us.”

“Ugh.” Tony tried to look away, but Natasha’s steady gaze and delivery drew him back.

“He knew just how to make us, make me, feel small and helpless. And even when I wasn’t helpless, I had to let him make me that way so I could learn to fight when I had nothing left of my own.”

She searched his face as she said these things, and he struggled with how much horror to let show. He didn’t know what she wanted to see from him. An hour ago, he wouldn’t have thought she’d ever want his sympathy, but now…. He didn’t know what the fuck she was after.

“It wasn’t difficult to kill him tonight, because he was never a fighter,” she continued. “It never would have occurred to him to carry a gun to protect himself. His last act was to pump me full of his newest cocktail because ten years ago, when I knew him, that would have been my nightmare. Five years ago—three years ago, even. But fuck him. I’m not who I was when I knew him, and this isn’t my nightmare anymore.”

Understanding dawned on Tony like she’d dumped a bucket of cold water over his head. He blinked at her with mingled admiration and unease. “That’s why you came here. You _want_ to talk.”

Natasha finally looked away, down into her drink. She took a smaller sip of vodka. “Ask me whatever you want, and I’ll tell you.”

Tony shook his head, alarm bells ringing. “Why don’t we wait until this junk is through your system, and you’re in your right mind? We can play Truth or Dare and do our nails. It’ll be fun.”

“Because I won’t want to tell you then,” she answered like he should be smart enough to know that.

“Exactly.” He tried to say it gently. Like the good guy he was trying to be—not the guy who’d jump at the chance to dig through Natasha Romanov’s closet.

She bristled. “You _owe_ me. You told me to call it in, and I am. I’m calling it in.”

“Yeah, and I’m trying to do the right thing here, sweetheart. You know that I know exactly what it’s like to be so fucked up, you can’t tell backwards from forwards—”

“And you trusted me to take you through it. I’m trusting you, now. Please, Tony.” Her eyes were a murky hazel in the low light of his hotel room, but her expression was naked. Clear as day.

Tony crunched an ice chip between his molars, hesitated for another breath, then nodded. Like hell was he going to make Natasha beg for his help. 1) He wasn’t a fucking monster. And 2) he wasn’t much better at making friends, either. 

“Fine. I feel like we should get this agreement in writing, but we’re friends so I’m trusting you won’t smother me in my sleep when you’re sober again and you realize what you’ve done.”

“And here I thought being friends meant you could trust me not to kill you in your sleep.”

Tony looked at her slouched on his bed, wearing his clothes, and kicked himself for the joke. For even thinking it. She was not a weapon. She’d come to his hotel room after avenging an old wrong because she was not a weapon.

“I do trust you. And I’m assuming the secrets you’re tired of keeping aren’t the ones you already gave to the world when you handed over HYDRA.” 

She shook her head. “You know what I’ve done.”

“Yeah, I’m familiar with your work. So how ‘bout this one—if you really wanna do this.” 

She nodded and took what looked like a fortifying sip of her drink. “I do. Shoot.”

“Why come to me?”

“I already said, you owed me,” she answered easily. 

“Yeah, but this isn’t just tit-for-tat. I know you and Cap are thick as thieves these days. Why not trust him with your skeletons?” Tony had no reason to be jealous. She’d chosen him over Cap. Yet the truth of his observation needled at him. She and Cap _were_ thick as thieves. Something had happened between them when HYDRA had reared up out of SHIELD, and Tony only had the barest sketch of those events. 

“Maybe I’m not ready for him to know me that well,” she finally answered. “Maybe I still care what he thinks about me.”

“And he wouldn’t have wanted you to go rogue and assassinate this Proshkin guy at a conference in DC,” Tony finished.

“No, he wouldn’t,” she agreed.

“Me, though…”

“I’m not that worried what you think of me,” she said with a twist of her lips. 

“…Thanks, I think.” Tony scratched his head and smiled into his drink. He could carry her secrets because he wouldn’t judge her for them. That kind of did feel like a compliment. 

“You’re welcome.” 

“Why do you care what Cap thinks of you, anyway?” Tony swirled his drink and added a splash more vodka from the bottle he’d bought down at the hotel bar once the mini bottles were empty. “Even when he’s not around, I like to tell him to fuck off.”

Natasha’s eyes narrowed. “Tony, does the voice of your conscience sound like Steve Rogers?”

“Doesn’t everybody’s?” He smiled, and she returned it, and if he wasn’t careful, he would start to like this Natasha. And he was not allowed to do that, because this Natasha wasn’t the real Natasha.

Unless maybe she wanted this to be the real Natasha, and she was using him to take her for a test drive. Intriguing. 

“What else do you want to know?” she asked, leaning a little forward over her knees, like this was fun.

“What would you like me to know?” he tried, hoping for an easy angle of entry, but she shook her head.

“Whatever you want.”

“Ugh, fine.” He rolled his eyes. “I guess, uh, when did you and Bruce get down and dirty? He was real squirrely with me about the details.” Tony, himself, had always been an over-sharer, and he’d thought he and Bruce were tight enough that he’d have shared when he and Nat got together. But Bruce had always seemed more confused than anything when Tony asked.

Natasha rolled her eyes so hard she rolled backward on the bed. Careful not to spill her drink, she flopped her other arm across her face. “Oh my gosh, this is embarrassing.”

“Hey, you wanted—”

“We never did,” she said, steamrolling right over him, speaking to the ceiling.

“…What? Never?”

“Nope, not once.”

“Why on earth not? You two were an item for months. It was adorable and sickening.”

Nat lifted her arm away from her eyes and propped herself on one elbow to make another overly expressive face at him. “Well, Tony, when a man has no interest in a woman, it’s surprisingly simple for him to avoid having sex with her.”

“No, no.” Tony shook his head. “He liked you a lot. I know he did. He was just nervous. Justifiably so.”

“He liked the idea of liking me. There’s a difference.” She flopped back on the bed again and tugged the tie free from her hair. Stretching it between her thumb and forefinger, she aimed the elastic at him without looking and shot it. Of course, it hit him right in the chest, so he caught it against his shirt. 

“Why did you like him, then?” he asked quietly and slid the hair tie onto his wrist.

“Why not?” she answered with a shrug. “Beauty and the Beast, right? He used to scare the shit out of me—the one guy on the team I couldn’t talk down. Couldn’t manipulate.”

“Charming.”

“You asked.”

“You wanted me to ask. So, you got close to Bruce to see if you could manipulate him? That’s cold, even for you.

“Of course not.” She leaned up to frown at him. “I tried to get close to Bruce _because_ I knew I couldn’t manipulate him. He was like… this idea to me. This idea of romance. A fairytale. Which, I guess, was its own kind of manipulation. If I could love a monster like him, and he could love a monster like me, then we’d both have a place in the world.” She tipped back her glass and slurped the last of the vodka from between the ice cubes. “It was stupid and juvenile, and I knew better. And he took off in the jet instead of just breaking up with me in person.”

Tony shrugged noncommittally. “Eh. He hasn’t exactly figured out how to safely be Bruce and the Hulk. I think he was running from more than just you.”

“What’s the difference?” she said, voice gloomy. “And anyway, fairytales aren’t real. Romance doesn’t save anybody.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Tony grumbled. 

“What?” Natasha shoved herself upright again. “What did you say?”

“I said, you’re right.”

“Is this about you and Pepper?” She flipped over onto her stomach and eagerly held her cup out for more vodka.

“Come on, that wasn’t the deal,” Tony said, pouring her another two fingers. “I ask the questions, not you. This isn’t a slumber party.”

Her eyes widened a fraction, and her mouth twitched into a wistful smile. “I’ve never had a slumber party.”

“Me neither,” he admitted. “But I may be too old for this to count.”

She reached her hand over to where he sat in the desk chair and placed it carefully on his knee. “If it’s not too late for me to share secrets, then it’s not too late for us to have a slumber party.”

Tony smiled helplessly, disarmed. “Yeah, but you’re already in my PJs.”

“I bet room service has some—you should order them from room service. I have to pee. Order pajamas while I’m peeing.” With a grunt, she pushed herself to hands and knees and climbed off the bed, and by reflex Tony shot to his feet when she swayed, his hands outstretched to catch her. But she lurched over to the bathroom unassisted and, before shutting the door behind her, turned and pointed at the room phone. “PJs.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tony said. It would be nice not to have to sleep in his tux pants and dress shirt. Half-listening to make sure she really was peeing and not passing out, he picked up the phone.

*

“So, you really haven’t patched things up with Pepper?” She asked. “No Pepper-patch?”

Next to her on the bed, because this was now officially a slumber party, Tony tried to give her a face of deep judgment. But she just smiled at him, pleased with herself, and sipped her drink. At least she’d let him fill it mostly with club soda and just a splash of vodka. 

“At this time, there has been no Pepper-patch, no.”

“Why not? She’s fantastic. You’re good at lots of things. She loves you. You love her.” She counted these off on her fingers and held them up like evidence. 

Tony pressed her hand down to the bedspread. “That may all be true, but the things I’m good at are the things she still doesn’t like—almost dying a bunch of times, violence, peril, etc. And because I won’t give them up, we remain at an impasse.” 

“Hmm.” Natasha appeared to give this serious thought. “That is a problem. I don’t think we can or should fundamentally change who we are to make somebody else happy.”

Tony lifted his cup in a sarcastic toast. “I am Iron Man.”

They were propped up against all the bed’s pillows, and when Natasha turned to regard him, her breath puffed softly against his jaw. “Are you?”

There was no sarcasm in her expression, so he answered seriously. “Yeah, I think so. Are you a monster?”

She looked right back at him and shook her head. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I think…” He faced forward again and rubbed his hand over the starched hotel pajamas the front desk had delivered. The embroidered logo itched against his thigh. “I used to think you were a weapon. Like, that’s what you were for. Which isn’t the same as a monster…”

“But isn’t all that different.”

“I don’t think that anymore. But that’s not so much you changing as me correcting my assessment.”

“What changed your mind?”

“What you did for me six months ago.” 

They hadn’t talked about it since. Hadn’t even mentioned it. And yeah, Tony wasn’t actively Avenging right the moment, what with the fallout from Ultron still dogging him and sometimes kidnapping him, but it wasn’t like he and Natasha never saw each other. There’d been occasions, and she’d looked right past him.

Maybe because she hadn’t known what to say. Maybe because it took a dose of truth serum to get her to talk about anything remotely personal. 

She’d been silent for an unusually long spell, and he glanced over to see her watching him. “I wasn’t a weapon then?” she finally said.

“Not the way I remember it.”

“That was, um.” She frowned and bit her lips together. “That was supposed to be professional. It was the quickest way to save your life.”

“I know that.”

“You were far from the first person I fucked for professional ends.”

“I’ve read your file, so I know that, too.”

She wet her lips. “Do you still think about it, though?”

Tony nodded, not exactly sure what he was admitting to. He kept his hands firmly wrapped around his glass. “Do you?”

She nodded and slid him a quick look. “In a good or a bad way?”

“Well.” He huffed. “It’s a little clouded by the kidnapping and drugging.”

“Right, of course,” she said. “Obviously.”

“But you saved my life in a really intense and personal way. So, yeah, it’s a good memory.”

“I wanted to…” She shrugged. “Check in with you, after. See if you were okay, but I was… I think I was embarrassed.”

“You think?”

“I don’t have much experience with embarrassment.”

“Noted.”

“And that is not a challenge,” she said, jabbing him once with her elbow.

“Got it. No, I got it. Hey!” He laughed when she jabbed him a second time. “You wanna talk embarrassing—I was the one tied to a chair with a boner that would have killed me if you hadn’t shown up.”

“That is true.” With that second jab, she’d shifted closer, and on an exhale, she leaned gently against his shoulder. “What the hell was I even worried about? I don’t care what you think of me.” She said it as though she were reminding herself. 

Her weight grew heavier against him, like someone was cutting her strings one by one. She turned her face against the sleeve of his t-shirt, and the casual intimacy of it squeezed at his heart. Her breath was warm through the fabric when she spoke. “You said when I got there, ‘Oh good, it’s you. Anyone else and this would be embarrassing.’”

The fingers of her right hand were curled open against the side of his leg, so Tony went with his gut and slotted his together with hers. “Is that what I said?”

“Uh huh.”

“See, I knew you had nerves of steel.”

“And maybe you don’t care that much what I think of you, either,” she said with a smile in her voice.

“That, and you’d already cleaned up my puke.”

“Can you imagine if it’d been Steve on that op instead of me?”

He gave a full-body shudder. “Oh god, I would’ve just had somebody shoot me.” 

A warm laugh burst out of her, and Tony smiled, feeling like he’d accomplished something great.

*

Around three in the morning, Natasha got her revenge and only made it most of the way to the toilet before throwing up a delightful mix of vodka, bile, and whatever remained of Proshkin’s cocktail. Tony cleaned it up with hotel towels while Natasha knelt draped over the toilet and alternated between apologies and tired giggles.

“I owe you big time for this,” she said. “The next time you’re drugged, I’ll volunteer to have sex with you to save your life.”

Tony snorted a laugh and dropped another towel into the bathtub. “Aw, shucks, Nat.” He ran hot water over the towels to wash the worst of the smell down the drain and spent that time working up the courage to say, when he’d turned off the faucet, “Maybe we shouldn’t wait around for that, though. I, for one, hope never to be drugged again.”

Natasha looked blankly up at him from the bathroom floor, sweaty and pale. She looked lost and tired, so Tony sat down with his back to the side of the tub so she didn’t have to lean back to see him. She looked long and hard before using the toilet to shove to her feet. “I don’t want to hang out in here. I want to go to bed.”

When he offered to help her out of the bathroom, she shrugged him off. When he offered to sleep on the floor, she said, “Don’t be an idiot.”

*

Just before dawn, he woke up to her sliding back into bed, smelling like his toothpaste. He pushed up to one elbow, the terrible hotel pajamas all twisted around his legs. “Everything all right? Did you get sick again?”

“No, I’m fine,” she answered. “I feel fine. I used your toothbrush, though.” He could only see her in vague outline in the near-absolute dark of the room. 

“Oh. Okay.” He would not be using it again. He had a thing about toothbrushes. Toothbrushes and people handing him things. 

“Sorry,” she offered.

“No. Jeez, don’t worry about it.”

When her bare foot brushed along his shin, he thought it was an accident, but then he remembered that Natasha didn’t touch anyone or do anything by accident. He stopped breathing for a moment as she shifted a hair closer to him. 

“Just to be clear,” she began, “when you said ‘maybe we shouldn’t wait around for that,’ did you mean we shouldn’t wait to have sex, or we shouldn’t look forward to you getting drugged so we can have sex?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I mean, both. But definitely the first one.”

Her chin jerked in a nod, and the gentle sound of her skin against the sheet warned him the moment before she slid her hand to his waist and rolled herself over him. 

“Am I taking advantage of us in a vulnerable situation?” she asked, her knees firmly hugging his thighs.

Tony placed his hands on her ribs, the way he’d thought about for six months. He didn’t remember much of their encounter in that mildewed office, but the size and solidity of her ribcage was burned into his sense-memory. His fingers flexed against muscle and between bone and expanded as she inhaled.

“I feel like there’s a philosophical discussion to be had about sex and danger, and whether you and I, in this line of work, will bring that baggage to any relationship we attempt. So, the short answer is, maybe?”

She hesitated. “Do I need to hear the long answer?”

Tony shook his head. “We’ve been through enough tonight.”

He couldn’t see her mouth twitch into a smile, but he felt it when she put her hand on his jaw and kissed him. 

*

They lay together after, which surprised him a little—both that she would want to and that he did, too. Since he and Pepper had split, he hadn’t really wanted to touch anybody, let alone cuddle. But Nat curled on top of him, hands tucked under his sides, the toes of her right foot brushing his ankle, felt really fucking good.

They hadn’t talked about protection, which made them very bad, irresponsible adults. Except, he’d read her file, and she knew he’d read her file. There wouldn’t be a kid. And they were both way too finicky around strangers to catch anything. The fact that Tony had been bare in her twice in the last half a year meant something. 

What it meant, he was content to dance around for as long as Nat wanted to. But he hoped maybe they were done waiting to be drugged to talk to each other.

“Ask me again why I came to you,” she murmured against his chest. 

“Why?” he asked, tracing two fingers down the back of her arm. “I know you already told me the truth.”

“I told you what I thought was the truth.”

“Are you still…?”

“No, it’s out of my system. Just ask me, please.” Her fingers flexed beneath his ribs, and she slid one hand free to rest on his shoulder. 

“All right, why’d you come to me?”

She tapped a gentle pattern against his bicep. “After what happened with me and Steve and SHIELD, I might be, uh… compromised where he’s concerned.”

Tony paused at the top of an inhale, but she didn’t elaborate. He let his breath out slowly. _Compromised_ was a fancy word for something humiliatingly simple and, for Nat, seemingly impossible. “You’re in love him.”

“No. I don’t know,” she answered quickly, defensively. “It doesn’t matter.”

Tony ran down the line of Natasha’s recent actions with this new variable in the equation. She’d pursued Bruce after SHIELD’s implosion. She’d fucked Tony twice since then.

“I can’t say I blame you for aiming high,” he huffed. “And then, uh, correcting downward.”

“You would see it that way,” she said, frown audible in her voice.

“How should I see it?” He wasn’t jealous, really, and he congratulated himself on his earlier instinct. She and Cap were thick as thieves—and that scared the shit out of her. 

“You’re not scared of me,” he answered, on a hunch, before she had to.

She blew out a breath, and the tension that had been building in her body melted out of her. She was heavier against his ribs and stomach, and Tony smiled. 

“You might even like me a little.”

She rubbed her hand from his shoulder to his chest, pinched his nipple, and didn’t deny it.

“I think I like this talking-it-through thing,” he said thoughtfully.

“Me too,” she answered.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm [itstartledme](https://itstartledme.tumblr.com/) on tumblr!


End file.
